Founders at Work.pdf

300 Founders at Work
We see a lot of entrepreneurs that do this. That they actually find a way to
earn some money, but they don’t . . . they find a way to separate that from the
business itself. Where entrepreneurs try to mush the two together like, “Well,
let’s compromise the real business to sort of get more money in versus let’s find
a way to get money to cover the real business and leave it uncompromised.” But
they have to perform some unnatural acts to get started, which is what we did.
We were chosen under a Request for Proposal bid to build a student
accounting system for a vocational school in the state of Minnesota, which
helped us focus on what we were going to do. We had to really say, “OK, how
good’s our accounting knowledge?”—which had nothing to do with student
accounting; this was grading systems tied to student accounting. It was really a
one-off. It also told us how we could underestimate a project, how we would
manage a project, how we would manage engineers, how we would manage our
own time. And we got paid for learning on the job. All of us owe a lot to the person
who took the risk on people who looked like children, who had no work
experience other than the . . . the other three guys had been at the Federal
Reserve Bank longer. They were each about 4 years older than me, so they had
3 and 1/2 years of work experience and I had 13 months.
We were overly thoughtful about what we would do. When it came down to
“what special skills do we have,” we went back to that accounting class and in
fact opened up my college accounting book and said, “Let’s start programming
this from scratch and build accounting systems for smaller computers.”
Livingston: Was this before personal computers were even out there?
Winblad: They were coming really fast. Hobbyist computers already started
appearing. Now the year is 1975—remember that’s the year that Microsoft
started and Microsoft was writing Basic for kit computers. We didn’t have as
good soldering skills as probably Bill and Paul did. And we, of course, weren’t
working at the systems level writing the operating systems and languages, so we
first applied ours to a minicomputer. They were not on commodity processors.
They basically were pretty much like a high-end PC would be today.
We skipped a whole small era of computers that all got wiped off the planet.
Microsoft talks about how their first 80 customers died. Well, we had some of
those customers but very, very few. We moved into the PC market as the
8080A—which was the first Intel commodity processor, came out on a computer
called CADO. The company was in Torrance, California, and funded by
Sequoia. This was about 1978, maybe ’77 even. They were using commodity
processors—the first Intel processors—but a proprietary operating system. As a
result, we had to go find a language vendor because Microsoft’s Basic was so
weak, we couldn’t program a robust accounting system in it. We worked with a
language vendor that we OEMed, so we sold our product with an interpreter. A
very fast interpreter, so it never had to touch Microsoft’s young languages,
which was good because there was not a salvageable application software business.
The application vendors that started at that time all died as well.
That 13 months at the Fed and the 3 years the other guys had really was
a lot of computing experience relative to most people who were the first